The emergency procedure not only kept Gionfriddo breathing, but may have paved the way for similar life-saving procedures moving forward.

"It's the wave of the future," Dr. Robert Weatherly, a pediatric specialist at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, told the Associated Press. "I'm impressed by what they were able to accomplish."

For bringing together innovative researchers with world-class physicians, C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital is the winner of the 2013 Deal of the Year award from the Ann Arbor News/MLive Media Group in the health care category.

Other nominees in the sector were Esperion — for attracting more than $100 million in investments for the development of its cholesterol-fighting drug — and the Veterans Affairs Ann Arbor Health Care System for opening a newly expanded emergency room.

Hollister has been working on developing 3-D printed splints, known as scaffolds, for years as a researcher at the University of Michigan.

In 2008, he co-founded a private for-profit company — Tissue Regenerative Systems Inc. — and with the help of the Office of Technology Transfer secured licenses from the University of Michigan for many of the innovations that he and his team members developed at the school.

For Gionfriddo, the developments made by Hollister in 3-D printed biodegradable splints came just soon enough.

The Ohio-born child suffered from a birth defect that resulted in part of his bronchus — a branch off the main windpipe — being incompletely formed. The defect affects approximately 2,000 babies every year in the United States, but most outgrow the incompletion before it causes major problems. In cases like Gionfriddo’s, the incomplete airway can collapse, causing the child to stop breathing.

According to a story in the Associated Press, Kaiba first stopped breathing when he was 6 weeks old at a restaurant with his family. For the next month and a half, he was on a breathing machine as doctors attempted to find a way to fix his fragile airways.

When he came to Mott Children’s Hospital, doctors created 100 tubes using a 3-D printer that fused thin layers of biodegradable plastic. The goal was to attach Gionfriddo’s incomplete bronchus to the small tube, which would disintegrate after two to three years as his own tissue formed around it.

Hollister and Green have a patent pending on the new technology, but it had not yet received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at the time of the surgery. The team had to apply for — and receive — special permission to perform the procedure.